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From: Erik Naggum
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: macros vs HOFs (was: O'Caml)
Date: 12 Sep 2002 20:44:52 +0000
Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway
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* Gareth McCaughan
| They are ugly so that your code can be beautiful.
This is a frequently misunderstood point. A lot of programmers who get
transfixed by some blinding elegance never understand that what they have to
work with is elegant because a lot of the dirty details have been wiped under
the carpet. They sort of get this requirement that from this point onward,
/all/ code must be "elegant". I have come to believe that elegance, to be
achieved where it did not previously exist, you must do a lot of hard, dirty
work. The simpler and more elegant you want the abstraction to be, the more
time and effort you must expend on its fundamentals and its implementation.
--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.